In recent years, the constant technological evolution has made possible a large number of advances that would have been unthinkable years ago. In industrial environments, one of the latest developments that promises to stand out and is here to stay are virtual PLC.
The virtualization of these controllers will make it possible to decouple the hardware from the software, i.e. the software will be installed in the engineering stations, while the hardware will remain in another area outside the production area.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has experienced considerable growth in recent years, providing crucial improvements. However, it also has some limitations in terms of consumption, security, cost or scalability. In this blog, we will see how the appearance of LoRaWAN in this area can solve part of those limitations.
The physical protection of ports at hardware level within embedded systems allows control of the physical access interfaces, but what happens when these interfaces are necessary? Sometimes, access via JTAG or UART to systems is required for maintenance or modifications in different industrial processes. Thanks to these accesses, suppliers can access memory addresses to read or write, modify firmware, etc. Given the importance of these tasks, it is necessary to incorporate cybersecurity into the process and it is precisely on these measures that the subject of this article will focus.
Protection against fault injections, encryption of some memory sections within microcontrollers, or simple write protection are some of the defences that can be implemented to avoid problems within an industrial infrastructure
With the industrial revolution of Industry 4.0, industrial processes have become more intelligent, and this has led to the deployment of a greater number of devices.
All these deployments usually have a common point, being the gateways, which, after being deployed, are responsible for the translation of some protocols to the TCP/UDP frame or simply send the information to the cloud.
Being a point that gathers a large amount of data and capable of providing intelligence to industrial processes, industrial gateways have become a very desirable target for attackers.
Knowing the resources available when performing tasks of hardening a system, will allow us to optimize the time necessary to obtain a safer system. In addition, we have the possibility of using tools capable of auditing the system that identifies those configurations that are considered safe and which ones we could implement.
The programming of PLCs is a fundamental part of the initial phases when building and designing industrial plants. About that environment, the company will base all its operations in that environment making the configuration of these controllers a critical element. When it comes to programming these devices there are a series of steps and best practices that take advantage of the native functionalities available and that involve little or no need to resort to a PLC programmer, protecting the device in a simple way with minimum spend on resource.
Es tanta la información que se encuentra actualmente accesible para los usuarios en Internet, que aquella ofrecida por ciertas páginas web o aplicaciones en tiempo real puede resultar de especial preocupación en cuanto a su confidencialidad para ciertos sectores, dado que podría ser utilizada con fines malintencionados.
In order to increase security levels in OT networks, there are now solutions that monitor networks, devices and configurations, actively looking for anomalies and possible security flaws and intrusions that could take place. However, there are other types of attacks on ICS that are carried out on a completely different plane, where anomaly analysis systems can’t reach. These are attacks on analog sensors.
This post will analyse the vulnerabilities associated with Log4Shell, detected in the library Log4j, which is found in infinite software products both in technical and industrial fields. Although there have been other instances of more sophisticated vulnerabilities, the problem with this one is area of exposure.